Feel The Payne
April 8, 2016 1:01 PM   Subscribe

 
I still say the best video game movie was "Run Lola Run".
posted by happyroach at 1:08 PM on April 8, 2016 [10 favorites]


Nah, Scott Pilgrim Versus the World.
posted by praemunire at 1:10 PM on April 8, 2016 [8 favorites]


Call of Duty cinematic universe

laughing-turns-into-crying.gif
posted by penduluum at 1:15 PM on April 8, 2016 [7 favorites]


the movie industry is one long list of failed adaptations, books, television, games, whatever.
posted by quonsar II: smock fishpants and the temple of foon at 1:23 PM on April 8, 2016


As they say, the only thing worse than a movie based on a video game is a video game based on a movie.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 1:23 PM on April 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


Looks like someone is going to have to fight Uwe Boll pretty soon...
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:32 PM on April 8, 2016 [4 favorites]


I loved Silent Hill!

please don't throw tomatoes at me
posted by Existential Dread at 1:33 PM on April 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


The writer talks about Mortal Kombat but has video from Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. Neither of them is a particularly Great Action Movie but holy shit is the gap between them about as wide as the gap between say Nightmare on Elm Street and Nightmare on Elm Street 14: Freddy's Contractual Obligation.
posted by griphus at 1:33 PM on April 8, 2016 [8 favorites]


I liked Silent Hill a lot! There's very, very few horror movies that are as focused on women as Actual Human Beings With Actual Emotions as Silent Hill was and passes the (very low bar of the) Bechdel test with flying colors.
posted by griphus at 1:36 PM on April 8, 2016 [3 favorites]


I always find it funny when someone treats a licensed IP like an inoculation against a disease. Surely, the people that acquired the Street Fighter license would know the importance of the longstanding literary tradition of Ken and Ryu. Of course they'd treat Guile and Zangief with the respect they deserve, right?
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 1:38 PM on April 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


the only thing worse than a movie based on a video game is a video game based on a movie

And for some thoughts on that, I'd recommend this old Errant Signal piece, which basically says that movie to game adaptations send a lot of time getting the look and sound of the movie in the game, but them just cram the gameplay into whatever crap du jour is cheapest.
posted by Panjandrum at 1:39 PM on April 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


This echoes the discussion on the Warcraft movie thread here in January.
posted by mbrubeck at 1:41 PM on April 8, 2016


I made the mistake of flipping on Uwe Boll's Dungeon whatever In the Name of the King movie once, unaware of the name of the director. The set design at the beginning was actually surprisingly lovely, so I settled in to watch thinking this could be a pretty good escapist fantasy. The cast was also surprisingly A-list, with Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Ron Perlman, Claire Forlani, even Burt freakin Reynolds.

As soon as the dialogue started, a dread set in. Statham's character calls himself "Farmer" because he thinks people's names should reflect what they do? The monsters are dudes in laughable rubber masks running around? The stage fighting was super fake, like you could see them miss with the swords. It was frankly an unbelievable piece of garbage. I guess everyone needs a payday, but it amazes me that Boll can bankroll such a list of actors to produce such dreck. Who would invest the dollars?
posted by Existential Dread at 1:41 PM on April 8, 2016


Doesn't stop mortal kombat from having the most earworm theme known to man.
posted by Ferreous at 1:44 PM on April 8, 2016 [5 favorites]


I thought Boll's movies were primarily a way to siphon funds from the German government. According to Wikipedia he claims Germany will pay back half the cost of movies made in Germany.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 1:45 PM on April 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


Who would invest the dollars?
"Maybe you know it but it's not so easy to finance movies in total. And the reason I am able to do these kind of movies is I have a tax shelter fund in Germany, and if you invest in a movie in Germany you get basically fifty percent back from the government."
posted by griphus at 1:47 PM on April 8, 2016 [4 favorites]


Forgot to link the soundtrack for the post, the most awesomely silly of all time.

Yes, it's Mortal Kombat.
posted by sapagan at 1:48 PM on April 8, 2016 [3 favorites]


My old grad school department has a party involving bratwurst every fall, referred to as Bratfest. During and after grad school, I probably attended a dozen or so Bratfests. The only one I really remember clearly, distinct from the rest, was the year they did Mortal Kombrat, which is just about entirely due to the soundtrack.

(Well, that and the fact that another student there at the time was named Goro, so the snippet from the film where someone says breathlessly, "Goro must be killed!" got a lot of play.)

The article doesn't give quite enough credit to Raul Julia for Street Fighter; it would be pretty hard to overstate that.
posted by Four Ds at 1:55 PM on April 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


I thought the film adaptation of the Atari E.T. game was way better than the game, but this article doesn't even discuss it.
posted by goatdog at 1:56 PM on April 8, 2016 [13 favorites]


The article doesn't give quite enough credit to Raul Julia for Street Fighter; it would be pretty hard to overstate that.

I don't recall where this is mentioned, but a bunch of the cast and crew recall Julia's professionalism on set (while, you know, dying of late-stage stomach cancer) as the thing that would get everyone to push through the shitshow production and Jean Claude van Damme being a dick to everyone and actually get the movie made.
posted by griphus at 2:00 PM on April 8, 2016 [9 favorites]


I watched Far Cry. It looked less plasticky than the game.

It looked very, very wooden, instead.
posted by lmfsilva at 2:01 PM on April 8, 2016


I will never get over the death of the 2007 Halo movie. Neill Blomkamp directing! Peter Jackson producing! Weta Workshop for SFX! Full creative control for Bungie at the height of their powers! And script by 28 Days Later's Alex Garland -- just imagine his take on the Flood. It would have been phenomenal.

Now all we have are the few (admittedly cool) clips produced for Halo 3, and District 9, which is what Blomkamp turned his failed proto-project into. (And the project could always be revived, but with 343 at the helm and the original Bungie team scattered to the four winds, I don't have much hope it would be any good.)
posted by Rhaomi at 2:02 PM on April 8, 2016


Forgot to link the soundtrack for the post, the most awesomely silly of all time .

Thanks for this, sapagan. While I do listen to the theme every once in a while when I am in that kind of mood, I'd forgotten how great the rest of the soundtrack is.

KMFDM! Utah Saints! Orbital!
posted by sparklemotion at 2:04 PM on April 8, 2016 [5 favorites]


Yeah, Uwe Boll movies are basically a tax scam. *doorbell rings* Hold on a sec...


It's Uwe Boll. He wants to fight me.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 2:10 PM on April 8, 2016 [6 favorites]


Me, I say the best video-game movie is Wreck-it Ralph. But that's because the video games of the main characters weren't yet real, and the scriptwriters didn't have to nail plot points or provide fanservice. Or deal with sulky, slumming actors.
posted by Countess Elena at 3:57 PM on April 8, 2016 [7 favorites]


(Actually, I take it back, there was a lot of fanservice in that movie, but it didn't have to interfere with the plotting.)
posted by Countess Elena at 3:59 PM on April 8, 2016 [2 favorites]


MORTAL KOMBAT

techno music intensifies
posted by overeducated_alligator at 4:55 PM on April 8, 2016 [4 favorites]


As they say, the only thing worse than a movie based on a video game is a video game based on a movie.

Star Wars alone has spawned enough great video games to make nonsense of that aphorism.
posted by straight at 5:01 PM on April 8, 2016




I liked Silent Hill a lot!

You know Silent Hill is really not that bad if you look at it the right way. Other than Griphus' point about it being a female centred story, it is one of the few horror films shot in Brantford, Ontario (with minimal set dressing!) An ok script from Flin Flon, Manitoba's Roger Avary. Decently directed by Christophe Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf). Excellent production design by long time Cronenberg & Del Toro collaborator Carol Spier. Sean Bean gets killed in it (again). A lot of pluses I think. I think the main strike against it is that it is on the long side.

Easily the worst one I ever saw was Uwe Boll's House of the Dead. That was a terrible movie. The one I was most confused by was probably Sweet Home by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, but that may have been because of the subtitles.
posted by Ashwagandha at 5:59 PM on April 8, 2016 [2 favorites]


It's not a feature length film, but for me it's the only that was able to successfully capture the essence of what made the game itself great, and bring that experience to the viewer as a narrative film.

It's a 10-minute short from 2013, based on the game DayZ, a wildly successful mod for ArmA II. Everything in it rings true to the game - the environment, the sets and equipment, the language barriers, the dangers of trust and betrayal, the fear... it's all there. The production quality is very good, and the lead roles are performed well, though if I were to be nitpicky, the zombies near the beginning could have been handled a bit better.

It's called After DayZ (YT video).
posted by chambers at 6:04 PM on April 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


surprisingly A-list, with Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Ron Perlman, Claire Forlani, even Burt freakin Reynolds.

Haha No... that's not an A list cast. That's a cast of people you've heard of looking for a pay check. If the movie was made in 1976, Burt would have been an A lister. Burt circa 2007? Not so much.
posted by Ashwagandha at 6:35 PM on April 8, 2016


I liked Silent Hill a lot! There's very, very few horror movies that are as focused on women as Actual Human Beings With Actual Emotions as Silent Hill was and passes the (very low bar of the) Bechdel test with flying colors.

I realize we had a two hour long version of this conversation already on the horror podcast, but this is definitely one of those "why not just...not name it that, then" things for me. Everything interesting about Silent Hill as a film was either (a) slavish recreation of game aesthetics in a way that didn't really do much for the narrative, or (b) big narrative/characterological departures from the story/archetype it was adapting.

Of course, I was the one being a whining dork based on having played the crap out of the series, so I'm not sure what that does for my case.

But anyway the sequel was super bad but interesting for having Jon Snow in it and for trying surprisingly hard to work a lot of specific material from games 1 and 3 into the mix. Also for, somehow, getting Sean Bean to come back again.
posted by cortex at 7:24 PM on April 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


Might have been somewhere in the long-form Polygon piece about the troubled production of the film that was linked in this MetaFilter post a couple years back. Really good read.
posted by cortex at 7:35 PM on April 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


I like both the Silent Hill and Resident Evil movies. Resident Evil had some LOL moments I will admit, but otherwise a decent action movie with a great soundtrack from Marilyn Manson. The sequels were dreck.
posted by Brocktoon at 7:58 PM on April 8, 2016


Edge of Tomorrow is a great video game movie.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:47 AM on April 9, 2016 [5 favorites]


The good Star Wars games were based on the EU novels.

Even the (great) Blade Runner game had more than a little of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep about it.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 4:27 AM on April 9, 2016


I've seen all and honestly enjoyed most of the Resident Evil series, without ever having played the game. Only seen the first Silent Hill, and it's not good, but they did a hell of a job establishing the world and mood.

And compared to the unrelenting shitshow of Annihilation, Mortal Kombat is a masterpiece of cinema. Annihilation is unrelentingly awful, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I can't even recommend watching it ironically, it's that bad. Almost (non-video game adaptation category) as bad as The Craft or Batman and Robin. Yeah. That bad.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:08 AM on April 9, 2016


Word on the street is that 'Alien: Isolation' (which echoes Ridley Scott's 'Alien') is like candy for one who loves the movie -- have any of you played it?

I've been squinting at it and muttering "well, fifteen dollars isn't much, but if it lacks what it's being sold as I'm going to feel sad inside..."
posted by mr. digits at 8:57 AM on April 9, 2016


It's quite nice! The visual and sound design are really great, and do a surprisingly fantastic job of making it feel like an extension of the aesthetics of the original film, and the gameplay is, while not a pure sneak-and-fear experience, still oriented pretty darned effectively around a tense fear of being found.

You'll spend a lot of time hiding in lockers holding your breath.
posted by cortex at 9:17 AM on April 9, 2016


Evidently there's a Ratchet & Clank movie coming out later this month. That scratching sound you hear is the bottom of a barrel slowly being defaced. And I'm excited to see "Hardcore Henry," which while not officially tied to any one specific video game, sure looks like the mission statement was "let's make 'Call of Duty: The Movie.'"

I think you could make the case that the best movie based on a video game is Nuka Break, which is a fan film series based on Fallout.
posted by jbickers at 9:28 AM on April 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


And I'm excited to see "Hardcore Henry yt ," which while not officially tied to any one specific video game, sure looks like the mission statement was "let's make 'Call of Duty: The Movie.'"

And yet, the only image that comes to mind from that title, knowing nothing else about the movie, is a Henry Rollins porn parody.
posted by Existential Dread at 9:59 AM on April 9, 2016


Many years ago I read Future Noir, about the making of Blade Runner. Since then I'm amazed any good movies get made, ever. It really made me see the whole process in a different light. It’s hard enough to make a good movie (I assume) but it seems as if you’re fighting monsters the entire time, and the monsters want to make your movie bad.

Silent Hill really captured the atmosphere surprisingly well, I don’t have any idea what it was about. The Resident Evil movies were pretty fun.
posted by bongo_x at 5:11 PM on April 9, 2016


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